Mother Eloise Freeman, ninety-four, in her 1975 choir robe, rolled her wheelchair to the front of the fellowship hall, took my hand, and said, I think the church ought to know why Ruth stopped. Clarence said it was not necessary. Mother Freeman said, oh, I think it is.
She told three hundred people what she had watched happen thirty-nine years ago. That I had the finest voice in that choir, that I was going to lead it someday, and that when I married Clarence he went to the deacons and asked them, quietly, to stop giving me solos, because he did not like the attention his wife got. When that did not work, he simply wore me down at home, year after year, nobody wants to hear a married woman showing off, until I stopped coming to the loft at all.
Thirty-nine years I sat in the pew and did not sing a note, and the whole church thought I had just lost my voice or my interest. Mother Freeman knew better. She had been waiting thirty-nine years to say so.
Clarence said I had not hit a note since 1985. He was the reason I had not, and now the whole church knew it.
Then the pastor played the opening of Precious Lord, and Mother Freeman squeezed my hand, and I walked to that microphone for the first time in thirty-nine years.
I was afraid my voice would be gone. It was not. It came up out of me like water finding a crack it had been pushing against for four decades, and I sang Precious Lord, Take My Hand to three hundred people who were on their feet by the second verse.
Clarence sat alone in his chair. Nobody patted his hand.
I sing in the choir again now. Front row. Mother Freeman passed last spring, and I sang at her service, the solo she always said was mine. Clarence and I came to our own understanding, which is that my voice belongs to the Lord and to that loft and never again to a man who was only ever afraid of how high it could go.